First, you’ll need to register an account at Flickr if you don’t already have one.  The basic service is free, and the Pro account if you should choose to purchase it, is well worth the money.

Now that you have an account, you’ll notice that you have the chance to fill out a profile and manage your uploads, as well as upload files through your web browser.  This is easy, but there has to be an even easier way than that.

Enter F-spot—the simple and easy-to-use photo manager for your Ubuntu desktop.  If you don’t find it pre-installed, it’s easy to find in Synaptic and install in just moments.  If you need a little refresher on how to install applications through Synaptic, check out the beginning of our article on Gnome Do.

To use F-spot to upload your photos you simply need to have the photos somewhere on your hard drive.  Import them into F-spot using the  Import button and add any tags about the photos you want—location, people, events.

Once the images are in F-spot’s catalog, you can rate them, modify them and view them in a variety of ways.

Go to  edit > preferences and locate the flickr uploader and make sure the plugin is installed and enabled.

Now, to upload to Flickr all you need to do is select the images you wish to upload in F-spot, and go to the  file > export to > Flickr dialog.

You’ll need to authorize F-spot to upload to your Flickr account by clicking the Authorize button, and once you have allowed access to your Flickr account from F-spot, confirm the authorization and you’re ready to upload.

Click the  Export button and watch the images go.

Your albums and all information about your photos can be edited online on Flickr after they are uploaded as well, so if you want to change or add captions or tags you can easily do so at any time.

Sharing photos with your friends has never been more simple than this!  Watch the whole process from start to finish in the video below and enjoy sharing your photos, and check back soon for more Ubuntu tutorials!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgeWnAqvlXU

Have you ever downloaded a great application but wished it had a better icon?  In Ubuntu you can not only change any icon to a new one, but you can even use image formats that are so advanced neither windows nor OSX support it yet.  Find out how!

So for the sake of this article, I’ll use a great program that has an ugly icon as an example: Sonic Visualiser.  It’s a program that analyzes audio in a variety of visual ways and lets you see the sounds you’re hearing.

I looked through the Tango icons and Oxygen icons that I had and found one icon I would really like to replace it with.  Both of these icon sets are wonderfully developed and free, so you can’t possibly go wrong.

Before I can change my icon, I have to have to have a file I want to change - for Sonic Visualiser I created a Launcher on my desktop by  right click > Create Launcher.

I have filled out the Create Launcher dialog box with the proper information, making sure that the text in the Command field will open the desired application from the command-line.

To change my icon, I have to find the file itself and right click on it.  You’ll see a menu appear and at the bottom you’ll see an option called  Properties.  Click on  Properties to access the file properties dialog box.

Once we have this dialog box the rest is easy, click on the current icon you see in the top-left of the box, and it will launch a window allowing you to select whatever new icon you want.

For me, I just have to locate my icon and click and poof! it’s set as the new icon.  Now doesn’t that look a lot better?

Now we can take this to the next stage: what’s the difference between icon formats?  Surely a windows user will immediately remember the old .ico format, but Ubuntu will support many many common image formats as icons.  Typically, the best format for icons is .png, since it has support for something called variable transparency, meaning it can have beautiful edges and shadows without being a square of colour.

But PNG isn’t really more advanced than the other icon formats out there for OS X or Vista, I promised to take it one step further didn’t I?  Enter SVG.  In Ubuntu you can use vector images as icons too!  Why would you want a vector image over a PNG?

Because vector images are scalable, meaning you can resize them as big as you want and they always stay the same quality.  Go ahead and try it, find an SVG and set it as an icon, then you can stretch it the size of your entire desktop if you want and it will stay at full quality.

There you have it—straight from the source.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd2IoJOP9wU

First, the only way we can produce a professional quality document is by using a professional quality typeface. Since designing a typeface can take years, they often don’t come cheaply, however there are sometimes moderately priced fonts that you can find online. The single cheapest way to get fonts is to look for old software that is on sale that would have bundled fonts with it. Corel Draw and Adobe Creative Suite are excellent finds.

For the purposes of this article we will download a couple excellent typefaces from Jos Buveinga, called Fontin, and Fontin Sans. Simply click on those two links, scroll down to the bottom of the page and find the download link.  Also, if you’re looking for a great head-turning font, Jos also relased Museo Sans, the first 2 font files are free, the remaining 8 are moderately priced, but well worth the cost - be sure to check it out.

In Ubuntu there are two places the computer reads fonts:

/usr/share/fonts/ these fonts are installed in the system, and shared between all users of the computer. This is where you should put fonts that everybody will need, or fonts you won’t need to ‘deactivate’ from time to time because you will need to be logged in as administrator in order to move the files there.

~/.fonts/ these fonts are installed for your user only. This is quick and simple, and for the majority of what you’ll need this is perfect.

Any folder with a ‘.’ at the beginning makes it invisible, or a hidden folder, but we can easily reveal it or visit it either through going view > hidden files or typing the address ~/.fonts/ directly into our address bar.

If this is the first time you’re doing this, the folder may not yet exist and you’ll have to create it.

Now, any fonts that are inside this folder when a program starts, should appear within the font selection drop-down menu.

To keep your fonts organized you can place them in sub-folders, so I often like to place fonts that belong to a certain project together in one folder so I can ‘activate’ or ‘deactivate’ all of the necessary fonts for a project simply by moving the folder from my ~/.fonts/ folder into any other folder.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=06bMA_Lxe8Q